Talk:Subject complement

Original researchhi
Is this original work? RickK 05:37, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)

The It's I/It's me debate is really a specific example of the usage of subject complimnts. This content should therefore be moved to an article with such a name, and use this an example of the dispute. Lofty 15:26, 25 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Obviously so. &mdash; Nightst a  llion  (?) 19:10, 23 December 2006 (UTC)


 * "This is she" sounds very odd in colloquial British English, but I believe this is not the case in American English - in an episode of Friends, Rachel says "This is she" when answering a phone call. (Edmund1989 13:20, 14 May 2007 (UTC))


 * The whole section on that is a mess now. It's clearly nonsense anyway - people are trying to explain it coming from different viewpoints and they don't mix. Personally I would go with the French disjunctive pronoun argument, because clearly, it IS gramatically incorrect to say "it is I" but people reject this based on their prescriptive grammars (Edmund1989 (talk) 23:03, 23 March 2008 (UTC))

'Tis I
I just tossed in  'tis I parenthetically into the first line. To my ear, you can say 'tis I, but not 'tis me, even if we all accept "it's me". Agreement?samwaltz 15:25, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

Popular references
There is a New Yorker cartoon in which the newly minted college graduate calls home and introduces himself with "It is I." In fact, that is the entire text of the cartoon. (Robert Day, 1956) This topic and problem are certainly well-known, if not known well. Shenme 01:58, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Accuracy?
It seems to me that there are several things wrong with this article:

1. The opening statement "It is commonly held that..." Is it? By whom? I've yet to see a dictionary that lists "be" as a transitive verb, so you would need to be ignorant of grammar to suggest that 'be' can take an object. If this statement is to stand, I'd like to see it justified.

2. Who are the "prescriptive grammarians" (I've already changed the nonce word 'grammaticans') who regard "It's me" as a mistake? Certainly no current English grammar would say so, I think.

3. The use of "It's me" versus "It's I" is described as "rather common", which I think is inaccurate - it's later described more accurately: "the use of the subjective in the subject complement has almost entirely disappeared".

4. I agree that this should be part of the Subject complement article.

Unless there are objections, I'll return and make changes.

--Nyelvmark 20:54, 8 June 2007 (UTC)


 * I disagree with this merger. Subject complement is a very general concept, found in many languages. The debate over "It's I" versus "It's me" is quite specific to the English language. FilipeS 20:58, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

December 2007
Note on French - "moi" is the disjunctive pronoun, which is why I have reverted to theprevious edit (Edmund1989 (talk) 18:30, 5 December 2007 (UTC))

May 2008
What cases such as the following:

a) The boss took me to lunch.

b) The boss took Fred to lunch.

c) The boos took Fred and I to lunch.

The third usage is sadly common in spoken English, as the general lack of understanding of grammar seems to lead some speakers to prefer 'I' where 'me' would be correct.

I'm not sure that this is the proper page for this observation, but my guess is that someone else will know. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Smitty1e (talk • contribs) 01:24, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

June 2009
What about Me and Jane went to the store.

Everybody seems to talk like this these days.

Me thinks, I will soon be replaced with generalized me.

On the other hand, some people still use the subject pronoun (not the object pronoun) form:

It is you and I. Between you and I. This is she [answering the phone].


 * "It is you and I," and "This is she" are perfectly correct. "Between you and I" is simply wrong; "between" is a preposition.

Chinese language example doesn't make sense
"For example, in Mandarin Chinese "It is red" is rendered as tā hóng..."

This sentence seems like a statement with a truth value of false. "Tā hóng," like "It red," is not grammatically correct. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 210.0.231.224 (talk) 03:36, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

and as such they prove
"Prove"? What are the premises, the rules of inference, and the conclusion? 79.178.69.9 (talk) 17:45, 24 November 2011 (UTC)
 * I reworded around this. -- Beland (talk) 22:02, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

Explain
What is the difference between subject complement and predicative expression? Why do there need to be two separate articles? W. P. Uzer (talk) 12:04, 14 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Hear, hear! --Kent Dominic·(talk) 02:45, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

May, 2019: The Emperor's New Clothes
I'm the child who has the temerity to point out what linguists' groupthink has ignored: The notion of a subject complement that "complements the subject of the sentence" is as fundamentally flawed as it is incontrovertibly accepted. The flaw stems not from the premise that a stative complement " is a predicative expression that follows a linking verb (copula)" but from two enthymematic assumptions:
 * 1. That an adjectival adjunct (e.g., "Only the crops unaffected by the drought are suitable for sale") is excluded from the subject complement definition.
 * 2. That a subject complement completes the meaning of a subject.

That second enthymematic assumption is exposed in such examples as follows: The third example most clearly illustrates the fundamental flaw in the subject complement paradigm: the word, "not" complements the copula rather the subject. My ESL students can grasp that explanation while they're interminably confused by the subject complement verbiage in textbooks.
 * Where is your phone? Here it is. (I.e., "here" is either the subject of the sentence or an adverbial subject complement that doesn't follow the copula but instead modifies "is".)
 * Is that your phone? Yes, it is. (I.e. "it" is either the subject of the sentence or a subject complement that doesn't follow the copula.)
 * Is it new? No, it's not. (I.e. "not" is a prototypical subject complement under traditional linguistic analysis, however...)
 * Where are they? < "Where" adverbially modifies the verb, "are" rather than the subject, "they."
 * They're home. < "home" adverbially modifies the verb, "are," rather than the subject, "they."
 * Was she sure? < "sure" modifies the verb, "was" (i.e. her status) rather than the subject, "she."
 * She sure was. < ibid

ESL students who attempt to apply the traditional subject complement paradigm can't easily determine whether "Where" = "they," whether "They" = "home," etc. ESL students have further difficulty interpreting the difference between, e.g.:
 * 1. How was the deadline? (I.e. whether "How" constitutes a noun, pronoun, or adverb confounds ESL students who nonetheless use such questions by rote.)
 * 2. The deadline was fine. (I.e. "fine" as an adjective that corresponds to "deadline" is readily grasped by ESL students.)
 * 3. When was the deadline? (I.e. whether "When" constitutes a noun, pronoun, or adverb confounds ESL students who nonetheless use such questions by rote.)
 * 4. The deadline was on Friday. (I.e. "on Friday" as an adverbial phrase is readily grasped when explained in terms of the deadline's "was" status.)
 * 5. The deadline was Friday. (I.e. "Friday" as an adverbial that corresponds to "was" is not readily grasped due to limitations of the subject complement paradigm.)
 * 6. The deadline was Friday. (I.e. "Friday" as an noun that corresponds to "deadline" is readily grasped.)
 * 7. Yesterday was the deadline. (I.e. "deadline" as a noun that corresponds to "yesterday" is readily grasped.)
 * 8. The deadline was yesterday. (I.e. "yesterday" as an adverbial that corresponds to "was" is not readily grasped due to limitations of the subject complement paradigm.)
 * 9. The deadline was yesterday. (I.e. "yesterday" as an noun that corresponds to "deadline" is readily grasped.)
 * 10. The deadline was on yesterday. (I.e. "on yesterday" as an adjectival phrase that corresponds to "deadline" is typical of ESL students' errors in their attempt to apply a flawed subject complement paradigm that construes predicative expressions vis-a-vis their correspondence to subjects rather than their correspondence to copulas.)

Conclusion: The term subject complement, as universally adopted and typically explained, attempts to illustrate the nexus between a subject and predicative expression while obfuscating the more basic (and more practical) nexus between a stative verb and its argument. So instead of subject complement it should be stative complement. Such a paradigm shift would obviate explanations for sentences like, "It sure was," "They're here," and "The book-signing was Sunday afternoon." Kent Dominic 11:28, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

Replaced "Since copulas are stative verbs"
In the top section, I've replaced "Since copulas are stative verbs" with "Since linking verbs are intransitive". The original was incorrect in three ways:


 * 1) Copulas aren't all verbs. In some languages they're suffixes or even non-existent.
 * 2) Linking verbs aren't even all stative verbs. "Because" is both a linking verb and an action verb (non-stative verb).
 * 3) This statement is incorrectly given as the reason the verb doesn't affect subject complements. It's inherent in being a subject complement -- rather than an object -- that verbs don't affect it. It's about whether the verb is intransitive, not whether it's stative.

I would also support removing the phrase altogether since the rest of the sentence stands on its own in the context, and talking about transitivity could be read to imply that subject complements are some kind of object. Atkinson (talk) 19:06, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

Recent changes to the lede
Recently, Hildeoc has attempted to insert predicative nominative and predicate nominative as synonymous terms for subject complement in this article's lede. Such attempts are misguided. The terms are not synonymous. The former terms are hyponyms while the latter term is a hypernym. I.e., a subject complement may correspond either nominally (e.g., "Sean is a carpenter"), adjectivally (e.g., "Sean looks cool"), or adverbially (e.g., "Sean was here" or "Where is Waldo?"). I make those observations with a full apology for the shortcomings of this article as a whole, which neglects the extent to which the stative complement protologism is rightly supplanting subject complement as a term that has outlived its linguistic usefulness. For the uninitiated, a stative complement considers the predicative relation of an adjectival, adverbial, or nominal element vis-a-vis a stative verb rather than vis-a-vis a subject. Kent Dominic·(talk) 14:15, 4 January 2023 (UTC)

NOTE: According to the third sentence of the lede, "An adjective following the copula and describing the subject is called a predicative adjective ." Thus, the terms predicative nominative and predicate nominative (which include only nouns and pronouns) are too narrow to constitute synonyms re subject complement. To reiterate, they're hyponyms.--Kent Dominic·(talk) 17:32, 4 January 2023 (UTC)


 * @Kent Dominic: Alright. I've now adjusted the terminology and removed the external links, as they all were referring to the terms questioned by you. Are you fine with that? Sorry for the inconvenience in the first place. Greetings, Hildeoc (talk) 18:07, 4 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Your most recent changes seem pretty harmless. My main concern is that some of your prior changes were needlessly packing antiquated terms onto the sinking linguistic ship traditionally known as a subject complement. As it stands, the article here is fraught with major linguistic holes. E.g., "In grammar, a subject complement is a predicative expression that follows a linking verb (copula) and that complements the subject of a clause by either renaming or describing it" is laughably lame IMHO. It would more accurately be (for purposes of this article), "In traditional grammar, a subject complement is a predicative expression corresponding to a stative verb that is most commonly construed as a linking verb or copula. Thus, a subject complement complements the subject of a clause by characterizing or describing it." There's no requirement of following a verb (e.g., "Sorry seems to be the hardest word.") There's no "renaming" of anything, per se.
 * Modern grammar doesn't approve of the subject complement terminology either as described in the article or as restated above. It's used in an entirely different way - always as an adjunct. E.g., "Editors at Wikipedia are volunteers" or "clouds [that were] seen in the distance threatened rain," or "How is it that you disagree?" In my own work, I have five separate modern definitions for subject complement and a sixth that reads, "an outmoded taxon (invented in 1923) intended to classify a nominal word, nominal phrase, or nominal clause that complements a stative verb." It's true that grammarians expanded that 100-year-old term to include adjectival and adverbial characterizations, but that bit of trivia is beyond the scope of my own work, which presents definition #6 merely as a historical relic.
 * To be clear, I'd much rather see this article updated in the manner of the Preposition stranding article (i.e., "Historically, grammarians have described subject complement as XYZ..."), but I'd rather not be the editor who causes that riot. Kudos to you or Doric Loon or whomever else takes on that task. Kent Dominic·(talk) 18:49, 4 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Well, feel free to lend a hand. I didn't write this article. In principle, I actually just tried to make the article more consistent with regard to it being the previous target of predicate nominative. But as this is no issue here anymore, I won't deal with it any longer since I don't have the capacities for revising the actual content. Best, Hildeoc (talk) 19:09, 4 January 2023 (UTC)
 * PS: I've also diverted the corresponding redirects. Hildeoc (talk) 18:11, 4 January 2023 (UTC)

My recent wholesale changes
I've made a lot of changes, mainly to the lede, in order to make the entry comprehensible to an ordinary reader (although how comprehensible is a moot question). I've tried not to modify the actual content too much.

One has to go back to about July 2011 to find a succinct lede that actually makes sense. Since then accretions of various kinds have built up to make the lede into a confusing jumble of almost unrelated statements. It's like a small neat bush that has eventually grown into a very unruly tree that randomly sprawls across the fence. (One of the worst edits in terms of coherence was the removal of (1) and (2) from the start of the lede where the function of subject complements was said to be "either (1) renaming it or (2) describing it", where "it" is the subject of the sentence. Without those two numerals the coherence of the lede was broken, leaving readers to wander through an increasingly aimless collection of sentences.)

I do not mind if other editors edit my first attempt, but if you fancy yourself any kind of expert on language, please remember key concepts of cohesion and coherence. A piece of prose is not a wayward collection of random sentences. It should be guided and mustered, with signposts that tell the reader what the point is and where it is going. Somehow, in the last 13 years it gradually lost that as different editors had their way. Bathrobe (talk) 21:23, 31 March 2024 (UTC)


 * Kent Dominic has made a number of constructive changes to the entry. However, there is one edit that I would like to query. The article now states that "is" and "was" are cognate forms of "be". This is problematic in two ways:
 * 1. "be", "was", and "is" do not appear to be cognates. From a cursory glance at Internet sources they are etymologically unrelated.
 * "be" is from Old English bēon; akin to Old High German bim "am", Latin fui "I have been", futurus "about to be", fieri "to become", "be done", Greek phynai "to be born", "be by nature", phyein "to produce".
 * "was" is from Old English wæs, 1st & 3rd singular past indicative of wesan "to be"; akin to Old Norse vera "to be", var "was", Sanskrit vasati "he lives, dwells".
 * "is" is from Middle English, akin to Old High German ist "is" (from sīn "to be"), Latin est (from esse "to be"), Greek esti (from einai "to be")
 * 2. Whether "be", "was", or "is" are etymologically unrelated is actually irrelevant. What is relevant is that they all form part of the paradigm of the verb "to be" (infinitive, past simple singular, present simple 1st and 3rd person singular, respectively), and that the verb "to be" is generally identified as the "copula" in English. The conjugation of the verb "to be" in English is, in fact, exceptional in not consisting of etymologically related forms.
 * I would ask Kent to fix this inaccurate and irrelevant change to the entry. Bathrobe (talk) 15:49, 1 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Good catch. Lesson learned: haste makes waste when knowing inflection is wrong and having false cognates in mind but linking cognate instead. Off the top of my head, I'm pretty sure were is an inflected cognate of was, which are etymologically unrelated to been and being(participle) as inflected cognates of be (infinitive), while you're right about is, which is an inflected cognate of am, or vice versa, depending on the recollection of anyone who's survived the Proto-Germanic era with a contempory understanding of morphology.
 * Anyway, neither cognate nor inflected is contextually accurate re the article, and false cognate is somewhat true but admittedly misleading unless qualified. A generic word that's true of all modern-day be forms is concomitant. I'll go with that to see if it un-wreaks the havoc. Kent Dominic·(talk) 18:11, 1 April 2024 (UTC)
 * I think the word is suppletion. Although the traditional word conjugation would also work fine. In fact, a table showing the conjugation of the verb to be in a range of Indo-European languages can be found at that entry. See also realizational morphology. Bathrobe (talk) 19:43, 1 April 2024 (UTC)
 * I can't agree that conjugation, which involves inflection, would work fine. I agree that suppletion is the right linguistics term, but a practical consideration is whether to aim for technical accuracy of general accessibility for the sake of average readers. How many of them would relish navigating the phalanx of what an irregular suppletive form means in the case of be, which is defective since only being and been are bona fide conjugation via the inflection associated with suppletion?
 * Granted, concomitant might not be an everyday word, but it has a less daunting ring to my ear. Regardless, I'm not averse to the substitution of suppletive (as long as it's linked to "suppletive" < as parenthetically formatted) for concomitant, so do the honors if you're so inspired. Kent Dominic·(talk) 21:04, 1 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Can you demonstrate that concomitant has this meaning? I've never heard it and couldn't find it. Bathrobe (talk) 10:28, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Passive participle as a subject complement
Recent edits by Bathrobe deleted the article's assertion that "Since linking verbs are intransitive, subject complements are not affected by any action of the verb." That poorly-worded assertion had troubled me. In one sense, a passive voice construct involves a so-called copula expressive of a state rather than action. A copula nonetheless predicates a passive participle, which may be construed to passively affect the subject, e.g. "They were shocked" conveys the sense of a subject being affected by the operation of the copula. Thoughts, anyone? Kent Dominic·(talk) 01:53, 2 April 2024 (UTC)


 * "Since linking verbs are intransitive, subject complements are not affected by any action of the verb" bugged me, too, but I couldn't think of a truly appropriate replacement. That's why I used the term "object" -- according to the general understanding, subject complements are not objects of the verb, which it seemed to me was what was meant here.
 * IMO, "They were shocked" can have two meanings.
 * One is the passive: "They touched the live wires and they were shocked".
 * This cannot (normally) be intensified as "They were very shocked".
 * The other is with "shocked" as an adjective meaning something like "extremely upset or amazed in a bad way".
 * This one is a subject complement and can be intensified as "They were very shocked" (not just a little shocked).
 * That's why couching the statement in terms of the grammatical category of "object" is better than vague semantic expressions like "not be affected by" . Bathrobe (talk) 10:37, 2 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Truth be told, I started this tread more to troll the article than to elict comments. My obsessive interest in linguistics often makes me read Wikipedia articles on grammar (as well as Huddleston & Pullum stuff, et al) when I need a good laugh or cry.
 * Traditional grammarists who can't distinguish syntax from semantics would be shocked and dismissive regarding how I view stative complement in contrast to how this article and most traditionalists view the term. IMHO, the article's treatment of a stative complement as "a predicative a predicative expression that follows a copula (commonly known as a linking verb), which complements the subject of a clause by means of characterization that completes the meaning of the subject" is 100% accurate, but only 25% complete.
 * My brain is wired to apply literal interpretations to both subject and complement rather than subscribing to an arbitrary term that accounts for 1/4 of what a subject[*attributive noun*] complement rightly may be construed to comprehend. To see a Frankenstein scientist's mad sense of subject complement, do an Alt-F search on "LOVE to" in this talk page, then read that paragraph and the ensuing text. If you find anything enlightening there, you'll likely agree that it'll take no small amount of time for much of those novel-yet-reasonable articulations to gain traction in the relavent Wikipedia articles. Talk page indulgences are another matter.
 * P.S. Thanks to you, I'm conflicted whether to edit my posts on that page by substituting "suppletive forms" for "cognates", or to let it remain as a memorial to how arcane linguistic terms sometimes get the better of us.
 * Cheers. Kent Dominic·(talk) 13:31, 2 April 2024 (UTC)
 * I wouldn't bother using "suppletive form". I would simply state that (for example) "was" is the "3rd person simple past form of the copula be".
 * Of course, that introduces more grammatical terminology, so to simplify things you could state that it's a "form of the copula be". Or "a form of the copula be (3rd person simple past)". To avoid completely dumbing it down, put a link to the entry on "suppletion".
 * "Suppletion" is only arcane, by the way, because us moderns no longer know any Latin. Bathrobe (talk) 19:44, 2 April 2024 (UTC)
 * With regard to subject complement, I think the problem is that whereas most transitive verbs (in Latin, I assume) were followed by nouns in the accusative case etc., a small group of verbs obstinately took the nominative. To explain this they resorted to the concept that the following noun somehow "completed" the sense of the subject. Extend this to adjectives and you have the traditional treatment.
 * Then, of course, you have some other tricky constructions that you decide to call object complements. It doesn't matter how you do it, sorting all these troublesome phenomena into boxes is akin to a problem some men might experience when putting on their underpants in the morning: they can't fit it all in. Bathrobe (talk) 19:58, 2 April 2024 (UTC)